Prescription in Liturgy (2)

 In fact, a sense of the over-riding auctoritas of Tradition and Custom had not entirely disappeared from the three-volume The Celebration of Mass by J O'Connell, 1940 edition. He discussed customs 'praeter legem' ... beyond the law ... and goes on to explain that customs even 'contra legem' ... contrary to the law ... may become prescriptive. Apparently, the old Sacred Congregation of Rites was known to enforce usages which were contrary to the law!

Interestingly, O'Connell argues that "Popes in Constitutions that preface the liturgical books, while abolishing existing customs contrary to the rubrics of those books, do not prohibit future customs of this character".

This is particularly entertaining in view of the way that PF, at the end of Tc, tries to tie up his "abrogation" of earlier legislation and custom. (I wonder if S John Henry Newman's description of the C of E as "the House of Bondage" ought, in all fairness, to be transferreed to the Bergoglian Domus Sanctae Marthae.)

Incredibly, we live in times more restrictive and rigid than the 'rigid and archaic' decades before the Council! A Totally Tremendous Tyranny Time! It is remarkable how restrictive and dictatorial a peronist pope who is fuelled by a really stonking hatred of Tradition can manifest himself to be.

But I will conclude with some more of Dix.

"So far as the primitive bishop had any such right he had it not so much as bishop but as celebrant. When he ceased to be the normal celebrant it passed as a practical fact to other people. If any one were to say that from the sixth century to the eleventh it was habitually exercised much more by the copyists of liturgical MSS. than by bishops, it would not be easy to bring factual evidence to refute him. And in practice there is no doubt that it was exercised by the parish priest, 'doing the liturgy' for his flock under the guidance of tradition from such MSS. as he had, which he did not feel much scruple about adding to or altering with his own hand. ...

"However much ecclesiastical administrators like Innocent I and Charlemagne may have lamented the fact, the churches in the earlier ages did not desire uniformity. And those who have taken part with any understanding  in the worship of provincial and country churches in France and Spain and Italy and Germany--or even in the parish churches of England--may wonder whether they really care very much about it now."

TRUSS

 I have just heard ... and seen ... Her Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs say, on the Beeb, that we shall support "our Baltic Allies across the Black Sea".

I am not sure that ... for example ... the Marquess of Salisbury would have allowed himself this sort of geopolitical ... er ... oversimplification ...

Prescription in Liturgy (1)

 Printing ... its invention ... is the precondition for the issuing of modern  "I-am-the-Master-you-must-obey-me-please-bow-even-more-profoundly"-style liturgical legislation. Printing has, of course, been enhanced by other pieces of more recent technology.

Think about it. It was only printing which made it possible for the bullies on Edward VI's Privy Council in 1549 ruthlessly to enforce overnight the elimination in England of the Rites of Sarum, York, etc.. Only technology made it possible for PF arrogantly to claim that, before you have your breakfast croissant tomorrow morning, Summorum pontificum will have been replaced by Traditionis custodes.

This novel approach to Liturgy, inconceivable before about 1450, cannot be part of the Catholic Faith, the Depositum fidei handed down through the Apostles. Something totally missing for the first Christian millennium and a half can hardly be at the essential core of the Faith.

In 1943, Dom Gregory Dix wrote:

"There is remarkably little foundation for the [Anglican] idea which has been assiduously propagated of late years in England that 'the catholic priest. at least if he has any tincture of the true catholic and priestly spirit, would rather say the most jejune and ill-arranged rite, which was that imposed upon him by authority, than the most splendid liturgy devised by himself'. Either the whole church from the second century to the sixteenth was devoid of 'any tincture of the true catholic and priestly spirit', or such statements are comprehensively mistaken. ...

" ... in every century every liturgy borrowed where it chose, without the intervention of 'authority' in the matter at all, till we come to the edicts of Byzantine emperors and Charlemagne. It is true that in every church the rite was from time to time codified in a revision by the local bishop -- a Sarapion, a Basil, a Gregory. But it is also true that their work never endures as they leave it. The same process of unauthorised alteration  and addition and borrowing begins again ...

"The proof is written in almost every liturgical MS in existence. The primitive bishop had control of the text of the prayers because their recitation was his special 'liturgy'; he was the normal celebrant. When he passed on that 'liturgy' to individual presbyters, in practice if not in theory the same control tended to pass to the new normal celebrant, however objectionable in principle the fact may now seem to us. The presbyter was largely ruled by tradition-- as the bishop had been. But I have a not altogether inconsiderable experience of ancient liturgical MSS. Setting aside mere copyists' errors, I do not remember any two professing to give the same rite which altogether agree on the text of the celebrant's prayers."

To be continued.

A married priest at Econe

In his early days at Econe, Archbishop Lefebvre recruited the assistance of some talented teachers. One of these was Fr Francois-Olivier Dubuis.

Fr Dubuis was an antiquarian almost in the old Anglican Style ... one could imagine him getting on like a house on fire with the great Anglican Cornish antiquary, Canon Doble. At Econe, Dubuis taught patrology and history.

Born in 1921, he had begun life as a Calvinist, and was a pastor. He converted to Catholicism in 1954, and was ordained in 1964. He then taught at the Sion diocesan seminary. 

When, in 1971 (28 June), the Archbishop ordained his first priest for the Priestly Society, Fr Dubuis joined in the laying-on of hands. The priest who was then ordained remembers the participation of Fr Dubuis.

Fr Francois-Olivier Dubuis was married.

He died in 2003, having written a large number of learned books. 

And having assisted in the great enterprise of founding the SSPX.

Genocides

Today calls to our memory the vile horrors perpetrated by one of Europe's most 'civilised' and 'advanced' countries upon one of Europe's oldest and most decorous communities and cultures. May God protect and keep us from ever being 'advanced'. May he forgive us for our own continuing daily holocaust of the Unborn.

Today also remembers all genocides and all 'holocausts'.

As well as the Shoah, as well as the murder of the Unborn, I also recall today the Holocaust of Christians by the Turks ... of Greek Orthodox and of Armenians in particular.

Let us seek the prayers of Saint Chrysostom of Smyrna, the Metropolitan of that great Greek city. On September 10 1922, he was handed over by the Turkish regular military to be most abhominably tortured and mutilated and murdered by an Islamic mob. He was born in 1867; canonised by the Church of Greece in 1993; and is commemorated on the Sunday before the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

Hierarch and Holy Martyr, pray for us. Remember us, though unworthy, in your perpetual Liturgy.

The Revocation of Traditionis Custodes

Frankly, I see little likelihood of The Next Pope simply revoking Traditionis custodes. That's, somehow, not the style of the papal bureaucracy.

But think of S John XXIII's Veterum Sapientia, 1962, signed by him on the High Altar of S Peter's. It mandated the intensive teaching of Latin in priestly Formation. It had lots of detailed enactments (it might almost have been put together by an infant diaper-clad roche!!!) to ensure that this definitely happened. For example: the sacking of all seminary professors unable to teach orally in Latin ...

It has never been revoked. Nor, more sadly, has it ever been obeyed.

It has just been constantly and consistently ignored. 

It is undoubtedly Law; but if a law is universally ignored ...

I think our best hope, when the Lord is satisfied that PF has finally appointed enough Cardinal Electors, is for Tc simply to fade gracefully away. 'Cheshire Cat' legislation! But without the grin!

Canonical Philology

A circular today from a gentleman signing himself as a Reverend Canon.

So far, so good. The time when monsignori ... in Waugh's phrase ... were running around like rabbits, has, I hope, passed. "Canon" sounds so much more English.

But ... the missive refers to "... measure ... to mitigate against ... transmission ... The main mitigation against ..."

Oh dear.

The extent of Papal authority

Few theologians shaped Anglo-Papalism in the twentieth century more than Dom Gregory Dix. In 1938 he published a scintillating succession of articles explaining, to his fellow Anglicans, the Vatican I teaching about papal power. Near his conclusion came the following:

"The language of the Vatican [I] decrees on the Roman Pontiff is admittedly formidable at a first reading. ..."A primacy of jurisdiction, ordinary, immediate and episcopal" in every diocese in Christendom ... It is so unlike the powers we Anglicans concede to a Primacy. But is it? [Dix next apparently refers to the episode when the Bishop of Exeter refused to institute a clergyman, Mr Gorham, to a benefice and excommunicated latae sententiae anybody who should do so; the institution was done by a Commission from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dix goes on:] That was an act of jurisdiction in another man's diocese. It was an act of "ordinary" jurisdiction, since the Archbishop had an indisputable right, in the circumstances, to do it. It was an act of "immediate" jurisdiction, since he did not act as the bishop's delegate but against his protests. It was an act of "episcopal" jurisdiction, since it conveyed cure of souls. In other words, the whole Vatican definition of a primacy is latent in the harmless Anglican conception, for use when needed."

In our own time, when the Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, refused to ordain or license women, these acts were performed within the Chichester Diocese by Commission from Archbishop Carey, thereby providing another example of Dix's point.

When English Anglican Canon Law was revised in the 1960s, the powers of the Archbishops were clearly laid out: "The archbishop has throughout his province at all times metropolitical jurisdiction, as superintendent of all ecclesiastical matters therein, to correct and supply the defects of other bishops, and, during the time of his metropolitical visitation, jurisdiction as Ordinary ..." A later codification made clear that, during a visitation "the jurisdiction of all inferior Ordinaries is suspended ..."

The gist of Dix's broader argumentum ad hominem was: If you say that the early popes did not "exercise jurisdiction over the whole Church", I will agree, but with the proviso that this was a period when Bishops didn't exercise jurisdiction either ... because the whole concept of canonical jurisdiction only came later and so is anachronistic. 

The sort of authority which early popes did exercise in the Universal Church, so Dix argued, was exactly the same sort of authority that contemporary bishops exercised in their local, Particular, Churches. 

When Vatican I defined the Petrine Ministry, it did so in the juridical/canonical language of its own period (just as the first four Ecumenical Councils framed their Christology in the terms of the Greek metaphysics of their own time; although, as Dix puts it, the Gospel writers had not been Greek metaphysicians). Swallow episcopal jurisdiction, you can't avoid swallowing papal jurisdiction. Swallow the anachronisms of Nicea, and you'll be hard put to avoid swallowing those of Vatican I.

Sic Dixit.

Where Dix would indeed, I strongly suspect, dissent from the exercise of the Papacy as it happens during this present disordered pontificate is in his explanation: "It is, by implication a 'reserve power' in the constitution of the Church, which presupposes an emergency in the local church." 

This seemed, in 1938, fairly obvious. The Pope may have had ordinary, immediate, and episcopal jurisdiction, but he did not normally compose and issue the annual diocesan list whereby Father X was moved from parish Y to parish Z. He did not write each Pastoral Letter. Nor did the pope lay down in a personal communication to Mrs Murphy which decades of the Rosary she was to say when she nipped out to do her shopping, or exactly whereabouts the parish vacuum cleaner was to be stored.

Or how often the heating system was to be serviced. Even though lives could be at stake ...

There can be really profound implications in whether the junior curate in a parish takes his Day Off on Tuesday or Wednesday. Since the Roman Pontiff has Immediate Jurisdiction over all Catholics ... every single one in all the world ... it is clearly his right ... and duty ... to check up on which day each junior cleric throughout the world puts his feet up. And how far up he puts them.

Whenever there is angry controversy or violent disorder about such matters, and even if there isn't, the Holy Father would certainly have the right ... and duty ... to leap nimbly on to Eurostar and to come and sort things out ... Holy Father, how badly we need you ... come and be ordinary, immediate, and episcopal among us ...

Exactly.

That's not how it works.

That's not how it's meant to work.

Bishops are not "mere Vicars" of the Pope ... well, they weren't supposed to be according to Vatican II, anyway. 

And not until the Era of PF have they been treated as such. Incredibly, this is an era in which a pope, so he believes, has the authority to 'phone up a parishioner anywhere in the world and to give her pastoral directions ... without any reference to her bishop or pastor. An era in which each bishop is to be surrounded by minute regulations about his liturgical arrangements in his own diocese.

This is not a 'normal' period of Church history. It is a manic aberration. Its 'papacy' is an absurd parody of the Ministry granted by the Lord to S Peter.

You think I'm exaggerating matters? Get this:

Some Roman functionary, acting, so he claims, on the authority of PF, has recently attempted to lay down exactly what factual information each parish priest may or may not divulge in his parish newsletter!!

Do the nouns 'fool' and 'bully' spring unbidden to your mind? Or the adjectives 'pompous' and 'risible'?

That is why this current tyranny is too thoroughly ridiculous to survive; and too totally preposterous to demand any sort of respect or compliance.

 

 

The Preface of the Apostles

Reverend Fathers who said the Mass of the Chair of S Peter at the start of the Chair of Unity Octave, and have today celebrated the Church's greatest Teacher, S Paul the Occupant of the Twelfth Throne, will have used the Preface of the Apostles. I wonder how many of them have ever noticed a difference between the original version of this Preface as found in the Authentic Use of the Roman Rite; and the version provided in the UD (Usus Deterior) of the Roman Rite.

The Authentic form of this Preface goes back (at least) to the Verona Sacramentary, where there are three variants of its phraseology. All of them humbly beg the Lord that he may not desert his flock, but may keep it through his blessed Apostles under endless protection. 

The Deterior form, on the other hand, thanks the Lord because he does not desert his flock, but does keep it through his blessed Apostles under endless protection.

In other words, something which the Church, down to the 1970s, regarded as a boon which the Lord should be asked to bestow, from the 1970s has become something which we take for granted. We no longer ask God for it; we simply thank him for invariably doing it. 

It's just part, doncha know, of the Divine Routine. (And, significantly, the adverb suppliciter has done a runner from the text.)

I don't think these are slight matters.

One of the immense gains of the current pontificate has been to remind us ... so effectively, so vividly, so repeatedly ... that, while the Roman Pontiff cannot infallibly, ex cathedra, teach error, his teaching and his administration are capable of being (and most days are) profoundly flawed. S John Henry Newman realised this when he wrote about "suspense" in the function of the Magisterium.

The bossy brassy baroque pontiffs of the Renaissance period, and even Blessed Pio Nono, were not ashamed that the Church should pray for their Magisterium and their Administration to be kept authentic. When, around 1943, Rome prescribed that the Preface of the Apostles should also be used at Masses commemorating popes, the text of that Preface was left unmutilated. 

Apparently, even Pius XII, not invariably a self-effacing pontiff, could live with its phraseology and was willing humbly to associate it even more closely with the papal Magisterium!

It was left to those who stole power in the pontificate of S Paul VI to decide that begging God for authenticity in the exercise of the Petrine Ministry is somehow insulting to the occupant of the Roman See.

ARROGANCE OR HUMILITY?

Which of these two is the more truly disordered arrogance: (1) flamboyance, the triregnum, the sedes gestatoria, the flabella and the kissing of the the papal foot ... 

 ... or (2) perverting and corrupting the texts of prayers which have survived the vicissitudes of fifteen centuries? Twisting them so as to make them assert that wall-to-wall papal inerrancy is so assured and automatic a goody that we do not even need to bother the Almighty by praying for it?

When Pope Francis III presents himself on the balcony of S Peter's so humbly wearing a base-ball cap, an umbilical ring, and denim jeans ... O frabjous day ... we shall know for certain that, in an act of unfathomable humility, the Total Inerrancy of the Pope is finally about to be formally defined.

"Not a day too soon!" I hear you cry.

Is Traditionis custodes Ultra vires? July 22 2021 Cardinal Burke wrote:

 " Pope Benedict XVI, in his Letter to the Bishops of the World, accompanying the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, made clear that the Roman Missal in use before the Missal of Pope Paul VI, 'was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.'

"But can the Roman Pontiff juridically abrogate the Usus Antiquior? The fulness of power (plenitudo potestatis) of the Roman Pontiff is the power necessary to defend and promote the doctrine and discipline of the Church. It is not 'absolute power' which would include the power to change doctrine or to eradicate a liturgical discipline which has been alive in the Church since the time of Pope Gregory the Great and even earlier. The correct interpretation of Article 1 [of Traditionis custodes] cannot be the denial that the Usus Antiquior is an ever vital expression of 'the lex orandi of the Roman Rite'. Our Lord Who gave the wonderful gift of the Usus Antiquior will not permit it to be eradicated from the life of the Church.

"It must be remembered that, from a theological point of view, every valid celebration of a sacrament, by the very fact that it is a sacrament, is also, beyond any ecclesiastical legislation, an act of worship and, therefore, also a profession of faith. In that sense, it is not possible to exclude the Roman Missal, according to the Usus Antiquior, as a valid expression of the lex orandi and, therefore, of the lex credendi of the Church. It is a question of an objective reality of divine grace which cannot be changed by a mere act of will of even the highest ecclesiastical authority."

I venture to add that, if Traditionis custodes is ultra vires, contingent and inferior attempts at legislation on the basis of what it appears to mandate ... for example, by bishops ... will also have no power to bind.

Ecumenism

Ecumenical theology owes its origins to the Magisterial interventions of an occupant of the Petrine See of Rome. It began early in the first millennium with the Western Church setting itself free from the 'common sense' proposition that, since the Spirit is the possession of the Church, the Sacraments (fruits of the Spirit) cannot exist outside that Church. 

Common Sense is, so very often, a dangerous superstition. (Another example of this is the conviction of worthy but confused people that a pope who teaches error cannot truly be a pope.)

Pope S Stephen I (pope 254-257) opposed such a Common Sense view, insisting that heretical baptism is valid. Augustine, during the Donatist controversy, established that Holy Order could validly exist among schismatics. 

In times of controversy there is always a temptation to think that one's opponents, so grave are their errors, cannot possibly be validly conveying sacramental grace. (In our own time, the Sedes, poor poppets, are tempted by this 'certainty'.) But inexorably there grew up in the West the conviction that a valid minister with a very minimal intention and using an adequate Form and Matter could validly convey the sacraments, even when in a state of mortal sin, even when in schism, even when in heresy, even if apostate. 

The ultimate and sure basis for such a view lies in the certainty that the Lord Himself is the source of the sacraments and that He Himself guarantees them and that His word is Truth.

Sometimes silly people dismiss talk about validity and invalidity as 'rigid' and 'legalistic' and 'mechanical'. Foolishly, because they do not realise that the only alternative is the 'Cyprianic' view: that anybody who is not within (what the speaker confidently defines as) "the Church", lacks Baptism and all the other sacraments. This is a view that has been held in the Orthodox Church; Timothy Ware aka Metropolitan Kallistos once observed that while Westerners did not often, for obvious reasons, meet such Orthodox, they should not forget that they exist. 

Indeed they do; a very fine Orthodox piece of theological exegesis emerged in 2014 (Greek edition; English translation in 2015) which sought to demolish the entire tradition which descends from Pope Stephen through S Augustine and S Thomas Aquinas down to the 'One Baptism Ecumenism' of Vatican II. Called The Ecclesiological Renovation of Vatican II, by protopresbyter Peter Heers, it demonstrates with great clarity where you get to if you reject the Magisterium of Pope S Stephen I. It shows that 'Vatican II' is very far from being some sort of henotikon which all Orthodox are rushing with grateful hearts to embrace. But Vatican II is right and Heers is wrong.

Confusion also involves the Sacrament/Mystery of Holy Order. Last year, a Ukrainian Catholic Priest called James Siemens, a Canadian ex-Anglican, sadly joined one of the Orthodox jurisdictions which have been involved in the ructions between Constantinople and Moskow, and was received as priest, that is, without reordination. This has caused no little dissension on the Orthodoxosphere.

So it is clear that not all Orthodox necessarily accept exactly the same reading of the same data. A friend of mine, baptised as a presbyterian, became Orthodox in Brighton simply by being chrismated. When he subsequently became a monk on Mount Athos, this was all deemed a nullity and he was baptised and chrismated afresh. Yet both Mount Athos, and Holy Trinity Brighton ... so gaily painted in the Greek national colours of white and blue! ... acknowledge the primacy of the 'See of S Andrew'.

Such a praxis implies, of course, that all non-Orthodox are unbaptised heathen. For Orthodox with these attitudes, PF is not only not any sort of Sovereign Pontiff; he is not a Bishop, not a priest, because he is not even a baptised Christian layman. 

There is, surely, little possibility of 'ecumenism' with those who are entangled in the enchanting  locks of this particular Neaera. I am not sure how wise it is for some Westerners to feel that 'Unity' with the Separated Byzantines is so much simpler a proposition than Unity with Rome.

Only the 'mechanical' and 'rigid' and 'legalistic' papal teaching, that valid sacraments can exist outside the canonical bounds of the Church, affords a basis, both theologically and practically, for ecumenical activity and progress. Vide Communionis notio and Dominus Iesus.

It is to be applauded and embraced.

Death and Life in Tudor Oxfordshire (2)

A little way out of Oxford there is a typical English market town called Thame. It sits on a river, the River Thame. But that river is certainly not to be confused with the River Thames, which anyway, in Oxford, is known as the Isis ... important for you all to know all that ...

The Church in Thame contains the monument of a 'Lord Williams'; son of one of those Welshmen-on-the-make who accompanied Henry Tudor in the Welsh Invasion of 1485. Williams himself, who made a packet out of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, has the countenance of an unreflective bruiser. In the reign of Good Queen Mary, he presided at the burning of Latimer and Ridley in Oxford's Broad Street. (Quaeritur: should he be in the Guiness Book of Records? Is there anybody else in history who got to preside at the burning of two bishops?) 

Ridley's last cry was "Lorde, into thy handes.etc." Williams, affecting to consider "Lorde" as addressed to himself, replied "Master Ridley, I will remember your sute" [Foxe's plate is reproduced in Duffy's Fires of Faith]. Now that really does count as Kicking A Man When He Is Down. Compared with it, the humour of the pre-War Anglo-Catholic Society of S Peter and S Paul ('For Sale: Latimer and Ridley Pricket Stands') seems almost kindly. There is a child-like innocence, almost a whiff of the playpen, about Mgr Ronald Knox and his chums who laughed so much in the early decades of the last century.

But I don't really think Lord Williams was very funny. You see, I feel an ineradicable suspicion that, had the old bully survived a couple of decades into the reign of Bessie Tudor, he would have been found accompanying the Seminary Priests on their way to the rack, the rope, and the knife, with the same heavy and unsympathetic humour.

Go to Thame and look at his face and see what you think.